CHAPTER 15

The Internet

THE EVOLUTION OF THE INTERNET

The Internet has been through some massive changes and several dramatic reversals of fortune since its origins in the late 1960s. It started out in relative obscurity, and with an entirely different name—ARPANET—and was developed to assist the military during the cold war. But in a little over two decades, it underwent a name change and morphed into the more populist communications tool known as the Internet. By the mid 1990s, this once plebian communications tool was beginning to be perceived as a viable medium for entertainment.

This was the time of the dot com boom, and there was frenzied launching of new websites, many of them built for entertainment purposes. Everyone was hoping to “strike gold in cyberspace.” Unfortunately, within a few short years, just after the new millennium arrived, it became evident that the great majority of these brash new websites were not generating the profits that were anticipated. The plug was pulled on many a site, and we were suddenly looking at a dot com bust.

In recent years, however, the Internet has not only rebounded but has become an even more robust medium for entertainment than almost anyone during the boom years could have predicted. In large part, this resurgence has been due to the growing numbers of households with broadband connectivity, which makes it possible to enjoy video on the Internet, as well as other forms of entertainment that require high speed access.

The Internet is now home to a diverse array of narrative-based genres, a number of them unique to this medium. We have already discussed several of them in previous chapters, such as webisodes and faux blogs, as well as Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), which we will be exploring in more detail in future chapters. The Internet is also an important component of many works of transmedia storytelling and interactive TV. Furthermore, as we have seen, it is often used as a platform for narrative-rich projects used to teach, promote, and inform. And finally, as we have also seen, there has been an explosion of user-generated material, virtual worlds, and social networking sites, many of which contain narrative content.

In addition to all these relatively well-established types of content, the Internet is also home to such new forms of digital storytelling that they don’t even have generic names yet. We will be looking at several of them in this chapter.

THE QUEST FOR “STICKINESS”

The Internet has many attributes which, when taken individually, may mirror other media, but when bundled together, make it a unique venue for enjoying entertainment. When a website contains a great many of these attributes, it is also likely to possess a quality known as stickiness. Though stickiness is unwelcome when it comes to doorknobs or furniture, it is an extremely desirable attribute for a website. It connotes the ability to draw people to the site and entice them to linger for long periods of time. If you want to create an entertainment site that is sticky, and hence appealing to users, you will want to include as many of these attributes as you can, providing, of course, that they make sense in terms of the project. Users are attracted to the Internet because it offers them experiences that are:

TV AS A ROLE MODEL?

Because the Web supports audio and video, and because it is viewed on a monitor that looks much like a TV screen, inexperienced Web developers are sometimes lulled into the belief that creating stories for the Web is much like creating stories for TV. While many important similarities do exist, so do significant differences, and ignoring those differences can seriously undermine a project.

This was one of the most important lessons learned by writers and producers who worked on the Internet’s earliest version of a webisode, The Spot, which began its run in 1995. The storylines revolved around a group of young singles living in a California beach house. Because of its focus on highly emotionally-charged relationships, The Spot had much in common with television soap operas. However, unlike TV, each of their stories was told from a first-person point of view, largely through journals. And somewhat like the movie Rashomon, the characters often gave different versions of the same events.

Stewart St. John, a writer–producer with an extensive background in television, served as the executive producer and head writer of The Spot during its last year, from 1996 to 1997. But his work on The Spot quickly taught him to appreciate the differences between TV and the Internet.

One way staff members on The Spot would involve fans in the story was to go into its chat room in character and chat with them. Some of these exchanges would be mentioned in the online journals “written” by fictitious characters, even weaving the users’ names into the accounts. Not only did this give the fans a few minutes of glory but it also made the show seem all the more real. In fact, many fans of The Spot were under the impression that the characters were actual people, which put extra pressure on the writers to keep them consistent and believable.

“You can’t think in terms of the way you’d create for television,” St. John asserted. “The Internet is its own world, and the language of that world is interactivity. This is the biggest mistake I’ve seen over the past few years; creators creating Internet sites using a television format. It won’t work.”

SOME UNIQUE WEB GENRES

As noted earlier, a number of story-rich genres have been created specifically for the Internet, and it also supports certain forms of narrative that blend several different media elements together, such as ARGs and transmedia storytelling. One of the most successful genres of Web entertainment, the MMOG, will be addressed in the next chapter. Now, however, let’s take a look at several other important Web-based narrative genres.

The Webisode

The webisode is a serialized story that is broken into short installments, each just a few minutes long, and each of which often ends in a cliffhanger. The genre evolved from The Spot, but while the storylines of The Spot were primarily conveyed by text and still images, today’s webisodes use full motion video or animation. Most webisodes revolve around contemporary characters in modern settings and center on personal dramas. And, despite the lessons learned by Stewart St. John and others working on The Spot, many of today’s webisodes are presented in a linear fashion, much like a TV show, with little or no opportunity for user participation.

Many of the new webisodes, as we discussed in Chapter 9, are spinoffs of popular TV shows. For example, The Office: The Accountants is the story of several regular characters from the hit TV show, The Office. However, a number of entirely original webisodes have debuted in recent years. One of the longest running webisodes is Something to Be Desired, which debuted in 2003, and as of this writing is in its fifth season. Shot in full motion video, it is the story of a group of young deejays who work at an FM radio station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Though done on a low budget with a local Pittsburgh crew and using local actors, it is well produced and has managed to attract enough fans to keep going.

Webisodics like Something to Be Desired and a handful of others illustrate that low budget webisodics can find a home on the Internet, but they are now facing competition from major Hollywood players. Professionals from TV and feature films are beginning to get into original webisodics in a big way. Three major entries with impressive Hollywood connections are The Strand, Prom Queen, and Afterworld.

The Strand, the “old-timer” of the group, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. It is headed up Dan Myrick, one of the creators of The Blair Witch Project. The Strand is set in the funky beach community of Venice, California and follows the intertwined lives of a group of offbeat characters, some played by actors and others who are real street people. Many of the scenes are improvised, and the production has a fresh and stylish feel to it. Though viewers cannot interact directly with the story, they can click on video bios of the characters and read the blog written by one of them. A more mainstream entry, Prom Queen, is produced by the great Hollywood luminary Michael Eisner, who once ran the Disney Studios. It debuted in 2007, and like Something to Be Desired and The Strand, it is shot on video. With 80 episodes, each just 90 seconds long, the steamy drama revolves around a seminal high school event: prom night.

Of the three, Afterworld is the most cutting-edge and contains the most interactive features. Coming online in 2007, it was made by a group of Hollywood professionals on a hefty $3 million budget. The first season consists of 130 episodes of two to three minutes in length, and unlike most new webisodes, it is animated. The arresting look of the series is part graphic novel, part anime. It is a grippingly told story of an ad executive who travels to New York on a business trip, only to wake up one morning to find that all humans have vanished and that anything dependent on modern technology no longer functions. The website features an interactive map and timeline, an illustrated journal “written” by the main character, and a forum filled with viewers’ observations of the story. Afterworld’s producers promise to add more interactive features, such as letting viewers interact with some of the characters, solve puzzles, and suggest plot lines.

Faux Blogs

The blog, short for Web log, is one of the most pervasive forms of communication on the Internet. A type of grassroots journalism, blogs are usually highly personal and are written much like diaries, often with daily entries. Many blogs use not only text and stills but also video. At last count, somewhere between 60 and 100 million blogs had been created, with a new one appearing every 1.4 seconds. With blogs achieving this sort of massive popularity, it was only a matter of time before the creative community recognized their potential for storytelling and started to develop faux blogs that looked just like the real thing.

We discussed one such faux blog in Chapter 9, Nigelblog, allegedly written by a character from the TV show Crossing Jordan. However, a number of faux blogs have been created that have no connection at all to Hollywood entertainment properties. Belle de Jour, for example, is a juicy blog “written” by a London call girl, and Ghost Town is a blog “written” by a young Ukrainian woman named Elena who likes to ride her motorcycle through the dead zone of Chernobyl. Her faux blog, illustrated with her own photographs, is a disturbing warning of the dangers of nuclear accidents. It is so convincingly done that it spread like wildfire around the Internet, with most people believing it was a true story.

Though many faux blogs are created as components of larger transmedia stories, Belle de Jour and Ghost Town indicate this genre can stand on its own as a form of fictional narrative.

Webcam Dramas

In a conceit that could only be possible on the Internet, a number of Web dramas have been presented as true-life video blogs made by someone using his or her own webcam. As series of such videos, purportedly made by a teenaged girl named Bree, caused a huge stir when they turned up on YouTube in 2006. The homemade-looking videos, collectively known as LonelyGirl15 (the girl’s user name) was an intimate portrait of a shy, awkward teenager and her friendship with a boy named Daniel. Bree corresponded with her fans by email (actually written by a woman involved with the production), and viewers in turn sent her videos they had made. The storylines of LonelyGirl15 were shaped to some degree on viewers’ feedback. Some of the videos contained hints that Bree was possibly being pulled into a sinister cult, and viewers grew increasingly alarmed by her situation. About four months after the first video appeared, however, it was revealed that Bree was actually an actress and that LonelyGirl15 was a work of fiction, a discovery that brought the series even more attention. (The making of LonelyGirl15 is discussed in Chapter 26.)

Though by far the best known of these webcam dramas, it was not the first. Two such works, Online Caroline and Planet Jemma, were produced several years earlier in the United Kingdom, as was the American-made Rachel’s Room, which we will be discussing a little later in this chapter.

Comedy Shorts

Comedy shorts are immensely popular on the Web. Because they are amusing, and usually just a few minutes long, they work extremely well as a form of “snack-o-tainment.” Many of these shorts tackle subject matter that would be considered in bad taste or too extreme for mainstream TV, further adding to their popularity. Three sites devoted to comedy shorts are Icebox, JibJab, and Funny or Die. Icebox specializes in animated shorts written by some of Hollywood’s funniest writers. JibJab, a site literally started in a garage by two brothers, was initially dedicated to Flash animated cartoons that they had created themselves, but it now carries the work of other people as well. Many of the cartoons are political in nature. The shorts on Funny or Die are mostly shot in full motion video and seem primarily to be targeted to young males. The site was founded by actor Will Ferrell.

Interactive Mysteries and Adventures

Although not at all numerous as compared to webisodes and other forms of Internet narratives, interactive mysteries and adventures are a dynamic form of Web entertainment. Such narratives give viewers the opportunity to become a participant in a story and solve a crime or a mystery, sometimes for prize money. For example, Save My Husband, which will be discussed in Chapter 17, solicits the help of viewers in finding a man who has been kidnapped. In Underground Bounty Hunter, viewers “become” bounty hunters and try to track down a villain without getting wounded, captured, or killed. And Stranger Adventures, which will be discussed later in the chapter, sends viewers on a new adventure each week to help a character find a hidden treasure.

AN ORGANIC APPROACH

Rachel’s Room, which debuted in 2001, took a highly innovative and organic approach to storytelling on the Web, fully using everything the Internet had to offer at the time to serve the purposes of the narrative. It was developed as part of Sony’s ambitious broadband initiative, Sony Screenblast, which catered to users with high bandwidth, and thus made heavy use of video, offering 50 video installments running between 3 and 5 minutes. In pushing the envelope of the Internet as a medium for fiction, it was one of the first dramas on the Web to utilize webcams to construct a “video diary.” Six long years later, LonelyGirl15 used an almost identical approach.

Rachel’s Room is a story that could only exist on the Web—the very fact that it takes place on the Internet is an integral part of the concept. Here is the conceit: 16-year-old Rachel Reed is at a crisis point in her life. Her father has recently passed away, and she is at war with her mother, who has a serious drinking problem. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Rachel feels misunderstood by everyone around her. Thus, in an effort to break out of her isolation and get a handle on things, she makes a radical decision: She will open herself up to strangers in the outside world. So they can see who she really is, she will place webcams around her bedroom and let them roll (though she plans to edit out the “boring parts” before putting the videos up on the Web). Furthermore, she will keep an online journal and also regularly go into a chat room to talk with members of her cyber support group. (See Figure 15.1.)

Figure 15.1 Rachel’s Room appeared to be the website of a real teenager, but it was actually a professionally written drama.

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Digital.

Arika Lisanne Mittman, who served as producer and head writer of Rachel’s Room, utilized both familiar and novel methods of telling Rachel’s story and encouraging audience participation. Pieces of Rachel’s story were revealed via the video episodes, her journal, and the chat sessions, and all three were coordinated in terms of content. Viewers could express themselves via message boards, emails, chats, and in certain special ways, such as the “Dreams” section of the site. The chat sessions were an important part of the Rachel’s Room experience. Mittman herself went into the chat room every weekday night, playing the part of Rachel. Sometimes these sessions contained serious discussions of teen-related issues, but sometimes they also advanced the story. In a clever blending of reality and fiction, she had Rachel meet a boy fan during one of these sessions, a charmer whom Rachel believes to be her soul mate. Against all common sense, she invites the boy (actually an actor playing a fan) to her room, unaware that he’s made a bet with his friends that he could seduce her on camera. Naturally, the relationship ends badly, but it caused great anxiety among Rachel’s real fans, many of whom were convinced that Rachel was a real girl and not a character in a fictional drama. Mittman says she developed this subplot in part as a cautionary tale for the site’s visitors.

CREATING A NEW NARRATIVE FORM

As we have seen with Rachel’s Room, the unique attributes of the Internet can successfully be harnessed to construct new types of narratives. As to be expected, however, the process of creating a new form can be full of challenges. As an example, let’s look at the case of the interactive adventure series, Stranger Adventures. In devising this series, the producers chose to break new ground and take Internet entertainment in an entirely new direction. But in doing so, they took care to invest a great deal of creative energy early on to get the series off to a good start.

Stranger Adventures, which debuted in 2006, is an anthology series, a form rare to the Web. A new story comes online each week on a Sunday and runs until the following Saturday. The stories thrust viewers into a first-person drama that begins when an individual they do not know (the “stranger” of the title) urgently requests their help in finding a treasure of some kind. Each story features a different stranger with a different need for help, and finding the treasure requires cracking a 10-digit code, which is done by uncovering clues embedded in the story. The first viewer to succeed receives a thank you gift in the form of $25,000 in cash. Thus, Stranger Adventures combines some of the features of TV drama with some elements of video games, creating a unique narrative genre. (See Figure 15.2.)

Figure 15.2 The anthology series Stranger Adventures involves viewers in an interactive adventure story.

Image courtesy of Riddle Productions, Inc.

Richie Solomon, the supervising producer of the series, describes it as “a story that takes an ordinary person on an extraordinary adventure.” The drama unfolds in real time through the emails and videos—usually several a day— sent to you by the stranger. If the stranger finds herself in trouble and needs your help at 3:30 in the morning, for example, you will receive a communication from her at 3:30 in the morning. “Our format is something entirely new,” Solomon said. “Our stories are extremely personal. The viewer needs to feel like the protagonist is talking directly to them. It’s very intimate and confessional. It shatters the fourth wall.”

Before the series was launched, its creator, Chris Tyler, CEO of Riddle Productions, spent over a year developing the concept. After writing and producing a demo episode, he conducted five online trials with focus groups to see if his concept would fly. The results were encouraging enough for Tyler to move his production company from Dallas to Hollywood. Solomon was hired shortly afterwards, and he worked closely with Tyler in refining the overall structure of the show. They examined what worked and what didn’t in the demo episode and applied that knowledge to a new pilot episode. The pilot was so successful that it earned the show an Emmy nomination (the series has since gone on to receive two more Emmy nominations).

Solomon, who was involved in hiring the writers for first season, told me how challenging many writers find this new form of writing to be. “Our writers have to relearn storytelling,” he said. “Many of the writers we interviewed in the beginning of the season just couldn’t get it. … It’s definitely a challenge to write a story that is told through video one moment and then through a text email the next and then through a series of interactive animations, all the while keeping the adventure engaging and exciting from one day to the next. And the writer must provide ample material for the designers, animators, and puzzle master to work with, all the while keeping these separate elements organic to the storytelling.”

As successful as the first season was, this innovative series is constantly evolving. “Just looking at one episode to the next is like comparing the special effects from the original Star Trek series to the latest movie version,” Solomon said. “Our technology is constantly improving as we continue to learn what works and what doesn’t.” Looking ahead, Riddle Productions plans to incorporate mobile SMS, faxes, and IM into the storytelling and is also exploring ways to expand the interactive aspects of the series.

CONCLUSION

As we have seen, the Internet has successfully recovered from the dot com bust at the turn of the millennium and has proven to be a robust vehicle for new kinds of entertainment experiences. In this chapter, we have seen some compelling examples of how stories developed for the Web can be told differently than stories developed for other media, especially TV. The most innovative of these new kinds of narratives are participatory and use a variety of Web-based technologies to advance the storyline. Many also break the fourth wall and blur reality and fiction in intriguing ways.

As the Internet continues to mature, we can expect to see new kinds of narratives that will advance the art of digital storytelling in this medium.

IDEA-GENERATING EXERCISES